Welcome to "Dust, Tears & Dice", a blog dedicated to the hobby of miniature wargaming.
If you fancy gaming periods off the beaten track then this is the place for you.
I am a regular member of The Wyvern Wargamers, formerly The Evesham Wargames Club drawing gamers from Worcester, Redditch, Kidderminster, Cheltenham and Stratford.
All players welcome.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Swatter rules review - Starship Troopers

Hot on the heels of the Songs of Blades and Heroes outing at Hammerhead thoughts turn to some of the other projects which have been hibernation for a while.

I have been on the look out for a CHAS proxy for some time the original model from the Starship Trooper game looked a little too futuristic for my tastes.

I came across the Firestorm Heavy mech from Albinoraven in the US.http://www.albinoravenmini.com/Now that's more like it..... Now just for the postie to deliver.

In the past I have used the Two Hour Wargames rules for the club campaign games, but in larger multiplayer games some of the mechanisms creak a little, I came across the swatter rules on the Ganesha Games site designed for bug hunting.

I missed these these the first time around, as a fan of the SBH rule mechanism I figured I would give them a try for the Starship Troopers Project and at a mere $8 a steal.

A
‘standard game’ contains between 20-50 figures a side, in fire teams of 2-5
figures based on CD's for movement purposes, I don't plan on adopting this element of the rules but to use a command radius forcing all to remain within "medium" of one another which should work just as well.

The
basic rules are similar to all SBH games.

You pick a unit choose to roll one to three dice to activate and each pass gives you an Action. If you roll two fails, then your turn
ends. Easy to follow, difficult to master.

Each unit has a
Quality Rating and a Combat Rating. Combat
is an opposed D6 dice roll where you add your Combat Rating rating plus modifiers (Weapon range, Support weapons, etc.). The difference between results proves you with the damage to your unit.

A nice feature of these rules is a dice pool which is issued to the opposing forces at the start of the game. You can dip into the pool of dice at any time during the game to add to your combat or shooting results or to generate reinforcements if you are the bugs..

Be careful because once the dice are gone, they are gone.

The rules contain a section detailing the points needed to build various units so I should be able to convert the current points to allocations to the Swatter rules.